Windows Assignment: When Paparazzi Attack!

A room with a view. That was what I was after as I marched around the West Village on a cold Sunday afternoon armed with a paparazzi-like camera and a large cappuccino (extra dry, skim, three Splendas, please). My assignment was to draw inspiration from Edward Hopper’s tendency to leave room for interpretation of the dialogue between his painted subjects. So I thought that even if I got arrested for trespassing or stalking (yeah, I actually did stand on a dumpster at one point), I’d be able to get tons of pictures of tons of local residents and then make up fantastic conversations between them.

Now fortunately or not, my sole subject captured was a dog, which forced me to dive into creativity mode, if not panic mode (what the ---- was I going to do with a roll of pictures of windows without people!?) Fear not though: I turned to my love of the Maira Kalman illustrated children’s books like Oo La La Max In Love and Hey Willy, See The Pyramids and decided to take my project in a whole new direction. And actually, this project morphed into something so much more interesting and relevant for me, and was the perfect opportunity for me to try a new “art form,” filled with made-up stories and whimsical captions galore.

Because I became so determined to make this project a keeper, something that would capture what I felt and thought about life in the Village as a 19-year-old, it transformed into a bigger ordeal than I ever could have predicted. I ran around the Village for six hours, eager to get in as much as I could before the sun went down, then edited pictures on my computer until my eyes went dry, and then had to give up plans a few days in a row so I could browse the $1 rack at Strand for a perfectly-sized book that I didn’t feel too guilty tearing the pages out of and glue photos till my fingers stuck together. But how FUN is that?

Of course I figured my project would be discredited in class: I convinced myself that it was probably was too interpretive, wouldn’t fit into the assignment guidelines, no one else would be quite so weirdly creative, etc. But I was surprised and quite frankly, amazed, at how inventive and personal most everyone’s pieces were. The entire class should truly be impressed with how different each student’s ideas turned out, and simultaneously, how great they all work together.